Think: A Software Framework for Component-based Operating System Kernels
ATEC '02 Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
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The first decades of the new millennium will witness an explosive growth in the number and diversity of networked devices. We foresee high degrees of mobility, heterogeneity, and interactions among computing devices connected to global networks. Conventional operating system architectures are inadequate for the wide-area, heterogeneous computing environments of the new millennium. While previous research in distributed operating systems solved many problems related to resource management, they seldom addressed the problems of heterogeneity and dynamic adaptability. On the other hand, middleware solutions, like CORBA and Jini, solve part of the heterogeneity problem by permitting seamless communication among different platforms. But, still, they do not address dynamic, distributed resource management and adaptability. This paper presents 2K, an integrated operating system architecture that addresses the problems of resource management in heterogeneous networks, dynamic adaptability, and configuration of component-based distributed applications. We discuss our rationale, describe our prototype implementation, and point to future directions.